Data Designer Extensibility (DDEX) SDK

The Data Designer Extensibility (DDEX) SDK provides documentation, samples, and resources to help you implement a DDEX provider for exposing third-party data source objects in Visual Studio. DDEX providers let you expose objects derived from almost any data source.

DDEX makes Visual Studio the best of tools for building data-driven applications, because it enables any third-party data source to fully participate in the rich Visual Studio design-time experience. By using DDEX, data objects from almost any source can participate in the Visual Studio IDE, appearing as an object hierarchy in the Server Explorer window, and participate fully in the drag-and-drop design-time experience.